It's really my own fault for forgetting about the spiders.
I'm calling them spiders because they had what any earthling would recognize as spiderlike qualities, but they weren't spiders. They couldn't have been. For one, each was the size of my space boot; for two and three, they were filled with white goo and it often took more than one pulse from my laser rifle to kill them. I'd already taken out at least a dozen of them---some as they crawled up a cave wall, others as they scuttled toward me across the alien landscape---but it wasn't long before other, larger antagonists demanded my attention. And these shot fireballs at me. So I found cover behind a rock to wait out the projectile attack, and I forgot about the spiders.
Actually, you know what? Time out. Let's stop for a second. This is obviously the first part of a story about virtual reality. It's the part that describes the thing I'm doing in VR as though I'm really doing it. And I write a little bit about doing the virtual thing, the simulacrum, and you think Oh, man, that sounds like a fun experience, but then I say Aha, but NO! THIS WAS VIRTUAL REALITY! and we all breathe deep the promise of immersive technology and wonder how our puny brains will handle it. Maybe that thing I'm doing is standing on the edge of a building, or ascending The Wall, driving a racecar, flying like a bird (or Iron Man), or wandering a beach, or being swarmed by alien spiders while distracted by fireballs and then dying an ignominious death of spider bites before I can take out the enemy's energy core.
